Essay On Bartleby The Scrivener

“To this was added, for a time, the ‘shameful’ class, for which special regulations were drawn up ‘so that those who belong to it would always be separated from the others’’(Foucault 182) Bartleby, from “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” by Herman Melville, was a character of whom belonged to this ‘shameful’ class in which Foucault talks about in “The Means of Correct Training”. Foucault talks about the ‘system of honorary classification’ in which all of the characters within Bartleby abide by. These three classifications of people, above normal, normal, and below normal, all work in a certain dynamic to discipline each other into staying where they are.
The boss represents the above normal classification. This is threatened when Bartleby doesn’t listen to his directions and rebels against him. Due to the worry about staying in power, he validates from his workers, the normal class, that he is correct in his actions. By asking validation from norm, he is pushing himself back up to above

striving to be accepted and liked by the upper class, the boss. The partake in the validation of the boss’s power in order to discipline one another into the idea that the boss is always right, while at the same time, separating Bartleby from them when they originally were all seen as middle class. Like Foucault says the ‘shameless class’ would wear ‘sackcloth’ to point out they were below average; Bartleby would spent long hours in the office and even took to sleeping there. These actions marked him as “not normal” similarly to the ‘sackcloth’. The further separated from Bartleby that his coworkers were, the more normal they seemed.Bartleby is the ‘shameful’ class and though his peers and boss try to discipline him into becoming part of the norm, Bartleby doesn’t care for fitting into social norms. He doesn’t strive or struggle to listen to the criticism of his peers and boss because nothing seems to really bother